In view of the continuing resistance of the FDP, it is becoming increasingly unlikely that the most important project of this legislative period from the Federal Ministry of Family Affairs, the basic child benefit, will be realized as Family Minister Lisa Paus (Greens) has imagined. The deputy federal chairman of the FDP, Johannes Vogel, told the magazine "Focus" at the weekend that the FDP would not bow to the demand for more money, without saying what it was for. Hardly anywhere in the welfare state is there such a confusion as in the case of family-related benefits. As a result, many families do not have an overview of what they are actually entitled to.
Heike Schmoll
Political correspondent in Berlin, responsible for the "Bildungswelten".
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"Support for education does not arrive, the child allowance for families with lower incomes is not called up by around 70 percent of those entitled," said Vogel. That cries out for less bureaucracy and digitization. However, this is hard socio-political work. "Lisa Paus doesn't do this homework, but she blames Christian Lindner for it. We won't get anywhere like that," Vogel criticized. However, he affirmed that the FDP is also striving for "an upwardly mobile and finally fair support of children and young people". Equal opportunities regardless of parental home are "a core issue of the Free Democrats".
Paus had estimated the cost of a new basic child benefit from 2025 at least twelve billion euros. The minister considers this sum to be the minimum in the fight against child poverty. In order to partially finance the project, the child allowances in income tax could be reduced, Paus had suggested.
The basic child benefit combines family policy benefits such as child benefit, benefits for children from the citizen's allowance and the child allowance for low-income families and is intended to be easier for eligible families to access through a digital application process. The Ministry of Family Affairs has not yet presented detailed calculations for the digitized approval of the bundled benefits. The Ministry of Finance estimates the cost of this at two to three billion euros.